HISTORICAL RECORDS:
Folk music chronicles Armenia's ancient traditions and modern heritage
The music that pours from the small speakers in Leon Janikian's office in Ryder Hall is compelling, insistent, sometimes driving, sometimes haunting. The sound is Eastern, a mix of exotic instruments such as the oud (like a mandolin), the kanoun (like a zither), the kemancha (like a violin), and the dumbeg (a drum). The man listening is wistful.
"It's great stuff," sighs Janikian, an assistant professor of music at N.U. "There are times when this stuff brings me to tears." That's not surprising, since the Armenian folk music Janikian hears is inextricably bound up with the history of the Armenian people-including the massacre of some 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Turks during the early part of this century. "This stuff has affected us all very deeply," says Janikian, himself an accomplished player of Armenian folk songs on the clarinet. "It makes us emotional."
Janikian, who's been playing and singing the old folk songs since he was a fourteen-year-old kid in Watertown, Massachusetts, is now a man with a mission: he wants to create a musical archive on compact disk of the traditional songs that tell the stories of those Armenians who migrated to the United States in the wake of the massacre.
"There are three million Armenians living in Armenia," says Janikian. "They play music. But they don't play any music that relates to the unique experiences of the emigrants from eastern Anatolia from the early 1920s through today. [Estimates of] the numbers of those immigrants range from over 500,000 to a million people, and I want to preserve their tradition."
In fact, says Janikian, preserving folk music may be the only way to adequately record the history of Armenian immigrants in the United States. "Most people were illiterate," he says. "Not much was written. They were much better in song than with words. When I was a child I'd hear the old people sing extemporaneous songs telling tales of their history."
Singing and playing music was a fixture in Janikian's boyhood in Watertown. People would get together in the front rooms of their triple-deckers, drinking coffee and talking, and invariably the evening would turn to song. "A real treat would be if they brought in a troubadour, an individual who would usually play the oud, which is the great-grandfather of the lute," Janikian recalls. "The troubadours were masters, and the greatest was Oudi Hrant-the greatest artists were given the names of the instruments they played."
Hrant was revered by the Armenians worldwide. He gave formal concerts when he visited the United States from the 1920s to the '50s, but he would also go to individual homes to entertain. A few recordings of these unrehearsed performances still survive. Hrant was famous for his "ghazels," florid songs in which his voice would play emotionally over dozens of notes for each syllable-sort of like scat-singing. "He was essentially performing the blues," says Janikian.
One of Janikian's favorite Oudi Hrant songs, in fact, is called "Hasta Yim"-literally, "I Am Sick." "These people love to have a good cry," Janikian explains. "They're very emotional people. Oudi Hrant is blind, so in the song, he writes, 'I'm blind, I'll never see the light of day, I'll never see the great wonders of our homeland, I'll never see Mount Ararat.' Then the song is sort of like a jewel. It turns around and he starts talking about the Armenian experience during the genocide. It's something that would never fly now. It would be considered inappropriate."
Songs about the Armenian experience in America touch on a variety of subjects: what it was like to leave Armenia and resettle in Watertown or Fresno, California, where there is also a sizable Armenian community. Or what it was like to work in a rubber factory, or put together shoes on an assembly line.
Janikian knows a lot about the history of his people because he knows lots of songs himself. A traveling folk musician for years, he says he has thousands of songs in his head-so many he tends to forget what he knows. Ten years ago, he began collecting old home recordings made on 78 rpm records. It seems that lots of older Armenians who share Janikian's love of folk music made recordings in their homes over the years, of everybody from Oudi Hrant to their aging aunt, because their old record players could record as well as play. Janikian has accumulated about 250 fragile 78s, each side containing three minutes of music. He has more songs on about fifty cassette tapes and some on reel-to-reel tapes. The collection is growing; ever since a couple of articles on his work appeared in a national Armenian-American newspaper, people have been calling from all over to give Janikian their recordings.
"So much material has been coming to me from outside," says Janikian. "People have been calling me, sending me records. People want to tell me their story. Old people want to sing songs to me on the telephone, like, 'Here's a song that we sang when I was a kid in the orphanage in Malatya. In a way I'm delighted, but I'm getting deluged.
"I've got everything from my own grandmother to other people's grandparents," he says. "In some cases it's not even music, but I feel like I have a moral obligation to preserve it. That's why they're sending it to me."
Transferring the recordings onto compact disks is no simple task. First Janikian must clean out the grooves on the old 78s as best he can. Then he dubs the recordings onto digital audiotape so he can store them on computer. Using special software, he can then see the waveforms of the music and literally redraw them if they show irregularities. At the end of the process, he has a recording that he can transfer onto compact disk free of clicks, pops, or scratches.
Janikian could spend up to ten hours cleaning up each old recording. "This is a long-term project," he admits. Software does exist that can automatically remove all of a recording's glitches, but it's expensive. "Someday when I convince some wealthy Armenian guy to give me a grant, I may get that," Janikian says. "Until then, I do it essentially manually on the computer. But I don't feel this is drudgery. I actually enjoy it." Several Armenian-American alumni of N.U. have promised Janikian funding. He is also considering seeking a federal grant.
What drives Janikian is the belief that if he preserves as many of the old songs and stories as he can, he'll have done his part to codify the history of his people. He'd like the completed compact disks to be housed in archives at the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown Square.
"I never set out to be an archivist," he says. "But I want to preserve the tradition of the Armenians. It's good for me, it's good for the community. Maybe we'll finally have a little bit of a record of what has gone on."
- Karen Feldscher
CRIME IN THE CITY:
It's Not What You Think
Like every major American city, Boston has more than its share of murders, armed robberies, and aggravated assaults. But ask the typical Bostonian what public safety issues are most on his mind, and he's likely to mention graffiti, abandoned cars, and teens hanging out on the corner.
A surprise? Not really, says Jack McDevitt, an assistant professor of criminal justice and codirector of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research. "These things that you have to confront every day and make you feel less secure about where you live are more important to people," McDevitt says.
That assessment was reinforced this year when officials from the Boston Police Department met with community leaders to help devise a first-in-the-nation strategic plan that would help establish the police agenda for 1996. After compiling detailed plans for every area of the city, officials discovered that the most common concerns of residents are not the headline-grabbing crimes, but offenses they believe lead to an overall decline in the neighborhoods.
"General street noise was a huge concern, and a lot of people complained about neighborhood deterioration-abandoned cars, lots, buildings," McDevitt says. "People want to know how they can get rid of these problems. You'd think that solving crimes is what people want, but what we're understanding is that people are as concerned about these other issues as they are about solving crimes."
Under McDevitt's supervision, six former Northeastern criminal justice graduate students served as facilitators or leaders of fifteen neighborhood groups. "One of our roles was to take a national view," McDevitt says. "The police could give you the local angle, what's being done. But we could say, 'Well, in San Antonio they've tried it this way and in Houston they tried it this way. Here's what the research is showing and what works and what doesn't.' "
At the heart of the students' goals and recommendations is community policing. In addition to emphasizing better communication between officers and residents, the reports recommend strict enforcement of "day-to-day" offenses.
"It makes sense," McDevitt says, "because if you arrest a guy for small-time drug dealing, this is also probably the same guy that broke into that apartment and who's also selling crack in a school zone. These people don't specialize; they're causing a lot of havoc in the neighborhoods."
The strategic plan also calls on residents to play a larger role in making neighborhoods safe. McDevitt cites as an example a group of Fenway residents who employed a "beach chair patrol" to chase drug dealers out of their neighborhood.
"The residents would come out on Friday and Saturday nights and set up chairs across from this park," he says. "When the people came in cars to buy drugs, the residents would write down license plate numbers. The drug dealers got angry, but the police would come to support the residents. Eventually, there was a big reduction in drug activity in the area."
- Michael Keegan
